Acropolis Museum

Acropolis Museum (modern complex of canted storeys), 2009

The Acropolis Museum ( Greek Μουσείο Ακρόπολης Mousio Akropolis ) is a museum in Athens . It only stores finds and objects from the Acropolis of Athens and has around 5 million visitors a year. The current building at the foot of the Acropolis was designed by Bernard Tschumi and Michalis Fotiadis and opened on June 20, 2009.

history

First museum from 1863

The presentation began with a few exhibits on the Acropolis rock in the open air, some of them under wooden roofs and temporary covers. When the Persian rubble was first excavated in 1863, it became clear that a museum building would soon be necessary. A year later, Demetrios Bernardakis, a Greek resident in Russia, donated the construction costs. Soon afterwards the construction of the first museum on the Acropolis began, which was designed by Panagiotis Kalkos (one of the architects of the National Archaeological Museum ). Over time, this also turned out to be too small, mainly because of the influx of visitors from abroad, so that half a century later a second Acropolis Museum was planned.

Second museum from 1937

The museum from 1937 was made of stone and placed entirely in a hollow on the rock.

It was built in 1937 by Patroklos Karantinos in the classic modern style in a hollow on the acropolis rock. It consists of a concrete skeleton that is filled with stone. The purpose of this unusual solution was to install the building in the rock depression as inconspicuously as possible from a distance. The building made full use of the hollow and could therefore no longer be expanded or significantly rebuilt. For the first time, the exhibits could be shown in chronological order.

According to the original plan, this museum was to be demolished for archaeological excavations. However, due to the lack of spaces on the Acropolis and its architectural value, this has been discarded. It is to be converted into an administration office and a public café is also to be set up.

Planning up to the new building

In 1974, the Greek Prime Minister Konstantinos Karamanlis expressed the desire to build a new museum. In the 1980s, Minister of Culture Melina Mercouri took up the suggestion again and secured the 1.8 hectare site of the Makrigianni barracks as a site on which there is also a former military hospital (designed by Wilhelm von Weiler) from 1839. She also linked the building with the demand for the return of the art treasures ( Elgin Marbles ) removed from the Acropolis by Lord Elgin from 1801 , especially the Parthenon frieze , which are now in the British Museum in London (see below). In the 1980s and 90s, a total of four competitions were announced (from the ideas competition to the design of the building), the last of which was necessary because inconsistencies had been discovered in the invitation to tender for the third competition, and the Italian competition winners Manfredi Nicoletti and Lucio Passarelli were not ready were to take an archaeological excavation site discovered in the meantime into account in their design. Their design was also criticized for its overly glamorous aesthetic.

Bernard Tschumi won the last competition .

The new Building

An important argument for choosing Bernard Tschumi's design was the consideration and integration of almost the entire excavation area. His design does not cite or imitate the Parthenon, but takes up its proportions and materials (the third floor has exactly its dimensions and orientation in order to be able to show the frieze in its entire length and in the original order). The building is extremely earthquake-proof , it rests on sliding pendulum bearings and is therefore decoupled from the subsurface so that earthquake waves cannot affect it.

The property was planted with olive trees and the bitter orange trees ( Citrus aurantium ) typical of Athens . Since olive trees grow very slowly, fully grown specimens were planted.

In the period up to the start of construction, an exit was placed directly in front of the planned building (Akropolis station on line 2) and Dionyssiou Areopagitou street was redesigned into a pedestrian zone (“Peripatos”) when the new subway line was built . Construction began in 2002, with numerous lawsuits from residents hindering construction before and afterwards.

During the construction period the ground floor was open to visitors; here animations about the construction and the move were shown. In 2007 the building was completed. For conservation reasons, the inside temperature in the building is exactly 23 ° C all year round. After the old museum was closed, the “most expensive move in the history of Athens” took place. On June 20, 2009, the new museum was opened with a state ceremony in the presence of numerous distinguished guests. Until December 31, 2009, the admission price was symbolically 1 euro .

Discussions about the new building

View of the Acropolis in Athens from the Acropolis Museum, 2009

Already at the beginning of the construction work in 2002, a wave of legal actions by residents began. One reason was probably the very prestigious “Acropolis View” in Athens, the loss of which significantly devalued numerous apartments; as reasons were given u. a. Construction noise, shading, the finds under the building.

The second phase of the lawsuit concerned the planned demolition of two buildings on Dionyssiou Areopagitou No. 17 and 19. These are two apartment buildings, one of which (from around 1910) belonged to the composer Vangelis . The other is an Art Deco building by the architect Vassilis Kouremenos, a friend of Picasso , built in 1930. They stood since the late 1970s under monument protection . According to those in favor of the demolition, the buildings obstructed the view from the museum to the Acropolis hill. The critics, however, held that this only applies to the view from the café terrace to the lower slope. In addition, the preservation of the listed buildings was one of the competition specifications and was made a condition for the building permit by the highest Greek administrative court, the State Council , following a local complaint. The compromise of demolishing the buildings and rebuilding the facades in the same street elsewhere was rejected by the owners as well as by most of the preservationists. In addition to the court decision, the building and environment ministries had to repeal the protection status, which was pronounced independently of that of the ministry of culture and which also affected six other buildings on the same street front. The International Council for the Preservation of Monuments ICOMOS also spoke out against the demolition. The State Council finally decided in July 2009 to overturn the ministerial decision on the demolition. On the other hand, the State Council approved the demolition of two more classicist buildings behind the museum (resolutions 2335/2009 and 2339/2009). At the beginning of February 2010, however, the new leadership of the Ministry of Culture decided to keep these buildings as well.

The architecture critic Tassis Papaioannou, who praised the urban development impulse of the museum, on the other hand complained about the lack of structural connection to the surrounding development and wrote in his collection of essays Architecture and City : "The new museum demonstratively ignores its built environment, it does not tolerate any buildings next to it [... ]. Its aesthetics are that of a shopping center, a showcase, with the only difference that behind the glass facade no cars or clothes are shown, but the sculptures of the Acropolis! ”In contrast, the architecture critic Roman Hollenstein stated: “ At the latest in what is probably the most beautiful sculpture room of the younger generation Time you can tell that Tschumi's house, so sober from the outside, is a masterpiece of museum architecture. The building, permeated by Greek clarity and mathematical logic and characterized by few materials (concrete, glass, marble), allows the sculptures to unfold in the light and the visitors to move freely in the space. "

The waves smoothed out as the opening date approached: numerous Greek newspapers reported extensively with mostly positive reviews and interviews about the museum, sometimes even in special supplements dedicated to the museum.

Exhibits

From archaic to late antiquity

In future, the museum will show around 300 statues and friezes as well as around 4,000 other smaller objects from the Archaic Age , Classical Antiquity and Late Antiquity , which were previously exhibited in the old Acropolis Museum on the Acropolis or were stored in magazines due to lack of space, including the following works:

A Kore (in the old showrooms)

The Parthenon Frieze

The construction of the museum is closely linked to the demand for the return of the Parthenon frieze . In 1801, when Athens was still part of the Ottoman Empire , the British ambassador to Constantinople , Lord Elgin , had obtained a permit to take finds from the Acropolis that were lying around. He then dismantled a large part of the Parthenon frieze (about half the original length or two thirds of the preserved frieze), numerous metopes , almost all gable figures as well as a caryatid of the Erechtheion and other works of art. They have been on display in the British Museum since 1816 , which refers to the legality of the acquisition by purchase from Lord Elgin and refuses to return the sculptures. In order to emphasize Greece's demand for a return, they initially wanted to keep the corresponding gaps in the Parthenon Hall free, but in the end they decided on darker plaster casts. The missing caryatid was not replaced, however.

Cup of the first marathon run (until 2015)

Until the completion of its own cultural center in 2015, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation had loaned the Michel Breal Cup, which Spiridon Louis received as the winner of the first marathon at the Olympic Games in 1896.

Awards

1974: Winckelmann Medal from the German Archaeological Institute (DAI)
2010: "Best Worldwide Tourism Project" of the British Guild of Travel Writers' (BGTW)
2012: "IIC Keck Award" from the International Institute of Conservation for a method developed with the Greek research institute FORTH according to which objects are restored directly in the exhibition, using a new type of laser technology